Although the Panasonic Lumix Cm1 is more camera than a smartphone, the company is still trying to market this well to people. The Panasonic Lumix CM1 has been updated to Android 5.0 Lollipop this week, which makes it a much more desirable smartphone that may be interesting to newbies, too, not just photography enthusiasts. Naturally, the best feature of the Panasonic Lumix hybrid is its powerful camera on the back, and that won’t change anytime soon, but knowing that Panasonic is keeping this phone trendy with updates is comforting, at least to some.
The Panasonic Lumix CM1 is a better camera than it is a smartphone, but hopefully Android 5.0 Lollipop will alleviate the bad experiences within the user interface of the device. The update should be showing up as a notification by now, so be sure to have Wi-Fi, a full battery, 500 MB space on your phone and you can go ahead and install Android 5.0. Besides the standard Lollipop improvements, the Panasonic Lumix CM1 doesn’t get any notable features. The new lockscreen notifications system, but you do need to look out for a change that might confuse you: you can’t start the camera while the flashlight is on.
Many users have noticed that the compression with the Panasonic Lumix CM1 does not work so well and people were hoping that the company addressed this issue in the update, but we haven’t seen any evidence of that in the changelog that they published. The smartphone camera tends to be rubbish at JPG compression, which is something Panasonic occasionally botches.
The Panasonic Lumix CM1 boasts with a unique design that looks exactly like a compact camera if viewed from the back of the phone. On the front, the device looks just like any other smartphone, but from the sides, you can clearly discern a couple of extra buttons that you can use for zooming, shutter and other settings that you might use when using the massive 20 MP camera with Leica optics andautofocus. The front camera is only a 1.1 MP one, but the phone’s specs are pretty impressive nonetheless.
Under the hood, the Panasonic Lumix CM1 comes with a Snapdragon 801 CPU clocked at 2.3 GHz quad core, backed by 2 GB RAM and 16 GB internal storage, with a microSD card slot available should you need more space for photos and videos. The rear camera can shoot 4K at 15 fps, which could have been better, but the manual controls and photos that you get out of the the Lumix CM1 are truly wonderful. The battery should also be beefy enough as it holds 2600 mAh of juice and that should suffice for the 4.7 inch FHD display that comes with 1080*1920 resolution and 469 ppi pixel density.
By updating to Android 5.0 Lollipop, users of the Panasonic Lumix CM1 will get to enjoy Material Design and a more refined user interface that will work well with the unique features that Panasonic themselves offer with this camera-phone. Although the news is exciting, there might not be that many of you out there who own this phone, because it’s mighty expensive at about $1200. You tell me if Lollipop improves the odds of you getting your hands on a Panasonic Lumix CM1 phone.
